A large deformation mortar formulation of self contact with finite sliding Original Research Article

This paper presents a new numerical method, in which self contact phenomena associated with a body undergoing large deformations and sliding can be described. In particular, the approach relies on a particular extension of the mortar approach appropriate for this class of problems. A bounding volume hierarchy (organized as a binary tree) is built for the self contact surface, based on the geometry and the mesh connectivity of the surface. A curvature criterion, using a new algorithm to detect subsurface adjacency, is used to accelerate the self contact searching procedure. To ensure that the mortar traction fields are properly defined on contiguous surface patches, a novel facet sorting algorithm is also proposed, based on the mesh connectivity of the contact element pairs found by the self contact searching algorithm. Several two- and three-dimensional numerical examples show the new self contact mortar formulation to be very efficient, and also demonstrate that it can be combined with multi-body contact algorithms to simulate a very general class of contact problems.